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Birth and who he was
Valerie Jane Morris Goodall was born in London, Hampstead, on 3 April 1934. Her parents were Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall, a businessman, and Margaret Myfanwe Joseph, a novelist who wrote under the pseudonym Vanne Morris-Goodall.
She is considered a pioneer in the study of wild chimpanzees and is best known for her more than sixty-year study of the social and familial interactions of wild chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. -
Hobbies and studies
Jane was a quiet child, a bookworm who adored Doctor Dolittle and devoured Tarzan novels. Reading did its stealthy, shape-shifting work: Jane cultivated a deep love of animals and a desire to travel to Africa and live among wild animals. Instead of going to university, Jane went to secretarial school, from which she graduated in 1952. -
First steps
Goodall has always been passionate about animals and Africa, which led her to a friend's farm in the Kenyan highlands in 1957. There she got a job as a secretary and, on her friend's advice, telephoned Kenyan palaeontologist and archaeologist Louis Leakey to arrange a meeting to talk about animals, he explained human origins in Africa and offered Jane a job at the museum and invited her to accompany him on a dig in the Olduvai Gorge. -
The firts learnings
In 1958, Goodall travelled to London to study primate behaviour with Osman Hill and primate anatomy with John Napier. -
The first contact
Leakey raised funds and, on 14 July 1960, Goodall arrived at the Gombe Stream Game Reserve (later to become Gombe Stream National Park), the first of the famous Dr Leakey-driven scientists known as "The Trimates". Tanzania, the site of the Reserve, was Tanganyika at the time, a British protectorate. -
Marriage
On 28 March 1964 she married the National Geographic photographer and videographer who had come to record her work in Gombe, Baron Hugo van Lawick, at Chelsea Old Church, London, and she became known as Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall during their marriage. -
Apprenticeship at university and presentation of their thesis
Following her groundbreaking discoveries on chimpanzee behaviour, Goodall was accepted at Cambridge University where she obtained aPhD in ethology.
In 1965, she defended her thesis under the tutelage of Robert Hinde, formerly a lecturer at St. John's College, Cambridge, entitled "Behaviour of chimpanzees in the wild", detailing the first five years of her study in Gombe Stream National Park. -
Birth of her child
The couple had one son, Hugo Eric Louis, born in 1967. -
Divorce
Unfortunately, they divorced in 1974 -
The Jane Goodall Institute
In 1977, Goodall established the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI), which supports Gombe's research, and of which she is the global leader, in an effort to protect chimpanzees and their habitats. With thirty offices around the world, the IJG is highly regarded for its innovative, community-focused conservation and development programmes in Africa. -
A book that revolutionised all knowledge
Goodall described the Gombe Chimpanzee War that occurred in 1974-1978 in her memoir, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe. His findings revolutionised contemporary understanding of chimpanzee behaviour, and were evidence of the social similarities between chimpanzees and humans, though in a much more obscure way. -
Death of her second husband
The following year, she married Derek Bryceson (Tanzanian Member of Parliament and Director of National Parks), who died of cancer in October 1980. -
Programme Roots & Shoots
Her global youth programme, Roots & Shoots, began in 1991 when a group of sixteen local teenagers met with her on her back porch in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. They were eager to discuss a variety of problems that they knew from experience and that caused them great concern. The organisation now has over ten thousand groups in more than sixty countries. -
President of Advocates for Animals and chair for peace and justice
Goodall is a former president of Advocates for Animals, an organisation that opposes the use of animals in medical research, zoos, farms and sports, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. And in April 2008, Goodall gave a lecture, "Reason for Hope," at the University of San Diego's Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice Lecture Series. -
Awards
In 2019, the Jane Goodall Institute was honoured by the BBVA Foundation with one of its Biodiversity Conservation Awards. Alongside the institute, the Asturian Fund for the Protection of Wild Animals (FAPAS) and the naturalist Joaquín Gutiérrez Acha also received recognition.